« Kosovo Stories | Main | Trouble with the furniture. »
August 09, 2006
More Kosovo Stories
The people of Gjakova are just like you and me, [well me anyway, I can’t speak for you obviously]. But then you sit down for a meal with Besari, a local doctor, and he tells you a chilling tale. In March 1999 he heard shouting and banging on the old gate leading into the beautiful small courtyard in front of his old house in the centre of Gjakova.
Besari didn’t hesitate, he picked up his one year old daughter, took the hand of his five year old daughter and together with his wife Fikriya walked out of the back door of their home, in the clothes they stood up in, and hiked for eleven hours over the mountains to the Albanian border.
Had Besari and his family not left as they did, this warm, friendly, big man would not have been sitting opposite me in the quiet evening, he would have been shot, and his wife Fikriya too, for she is a doctor as well. And their beautiful daughters would have become two of the 900 or so orphans left after the conflict.
It’s a situation we in this country have not had to consider since the nose of William’s boats scrunched up the pebble beach at Bexhill some nine hundred odd years ago; and then his regime seems to have been a bit more humanitarian than that of Milosevic.
One thing that Besari said to me, raising his glass of Kosovan beer, was: “Thank you.” I said: “For what?” He replied that it was part of our taxes that pay for NATO and the UN, thank you. At that moment the world seemed a smaller place.
Posted by john at August 9, 2006 10:17 AM